WANTED EXPLORERS!

Introduction: Are you looking for adventure?? Do you enjoy exploring the unknown and learning new things? The North American Geographic Society has an opportunity for you. We are recruiting interested parties to explore uncharted territories and interact with the natives.

Adventurers will experience wonderous opportunities:

• going on explorations
• bartering for goods
• making maps and learning about new people and lands

Task: Your teacher has received an email requesting help from the North American Geographic Society. You'll need to read that email and find out how to proceed. Once you have read the email, you will be creating your own country and exploring other unknown lands.

Adventurers will need to prepare for the adventure by studying past explorers. You can learn about four important explorers by completing the "Case of the Missing Trunks" webquest.

Then you will start to create your very own country by learning about resources and geographical features.

Finally, you will be ready for your own exploration.

Process:

1. Ask your teacher to read the email from the North American Geographic Society.
2. Divide the class into groups of 4-6 students.
3. Each group needs to decide on:
   1. Country name (make up your own)
   2. Citizen's names
4. Take a digital photo of your group.
5. Have your teacher email the North American Geographic Society your country names and group photos. You will receive a passport within two weeks, by snail mail.
6. In the meantime, your group should be designing a flag for your country and a map. Follow the flag and map guidelines.
7. You will need a small 2-3" copy of your flag to glue onto the passport and two large flags; one to carry with you on your explorations and one to leave behind in your homeland. One copy of your map will be sufficient. This should be displayed in your country area for other explorers to see.
8. Explorers have sponsors that help finance their expeditions. Christopher Columbus had trouble finding a sponsor and had to leave his homeland in order to find sponsorship. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella finally decided to become his sponsors. In order for you to go exploring, you must find a sponsor. Decide who that will be and send them a sponsor letter. If they accept, they will give you some natural resources from which you can create products to trade in the "new lands."
9. After examining the resources, the group needs to decide on products that can be traded with other explorers. You may also find other resources within your continents. Don't forget, there will be many exploring parties that could visit your new land. Plus, you'll be using your products to trade for other goods when you become the consumer. Make plenty of products or expect scarcity. Other explorers might get hostile!! Keep your products simple and easy to make. Produce plenty! You will have one type of product. Use the Create a Country worksheet to help organize your ideas.
10. In order to go exploring, you need to learn about explorers of the past. Complete the "Case of the Missing Trunks" webquest.
11. Once you have completed the webquest, your group will return to the computer lab and complete the research of one explorer. Using the biography website and appropriate webpages, they should fill in the Explorer Data Retrieval Chart and create a map of the voyage in MapMakers Toolkit.
12. Create and share your explorer poster with your classmates. Your poster should have:
    1. Name of explorer
    2. Picture of explorer
    3. Information on the data retrieval chart
    4. Map of their voyage
    5. Names of members in your group.
13. Once the posters are created, share your information with the class. Other class members should jot down important facts about each explorer. The same data retrieval chart can be duplicated and used for all four explorers.
14. Explorers kept logs of their journeys. Each day, they wrote about what happened on the journey, good or bad. When people went to colonize new countries, children went along. Read the book On the Mayflower Voyage of the Ship's Apprentice & a Passenger Girl by Kate Waters and Boats and Ships: rafts, galleons, pirate ships, whalers, ocean liner and submarines published by Scholastic. Divide your group so that you have one person who will write about the launching of your journey, one who will write about the sighting of land and what was found, plus the rest who will write about what happened on the voyage. Put the log entries together in a group log. Share your logs with other groups in the class.

It is time for exploring!!

1. There will be two exploring sessions. Your group will need to be divided so that some folks can go exploring and others can remain "in country" to welcome explorers from other countries.
2. Divide your resources in four piles. One to take with you during session #1 and one to have "in country" for trading. The other half will be used during session #2,
3. Exploring parties need to take along their passports, goods to trade and an exploring journal. When they arrive at another country, they will ask the inhabitants about their country, write down the country name and an interesting fact or two about the country and try to barter goods. Their passport will be stamped and they will move on to the next country.
4. Inhabitants who remain behind "in country" are responsible for informing explorers about their country, stamping passports and trading goods.
5. Once the explorations are finished, all of the group's goods should be divided taking into account a small gift for the sponsors.
6. The group should visit the sponsor and present the "riches" that they discovered and share their exploration journal. 

Opportunities to share:

1. Student groups shared their explorer posters with the class.
2. Maps and flags were also shared as they explorered.
3. After reading On the Mayflower Voyage of the Ship's Apprentice & a Passenger Girl by Kate Waters and Boats and Ships: rafts, galleons, pirate ships, whalers, ocean liner and submarines published by Scholastic and creating fictional journal entries of a typical voyage, the entries were shared with classmates.
4. Resources were bartered and traded with explorers.
5. A classbook was created featuring pictures from the unit.
6. Journals of the exploration were shared with classmates and sponsors.

Assessment: A student survey is conducted after the unit is completed. Anecdotal notes are used for daily assessment.

Passport front cover

Passport inside

Staff Letter about Sponsorship

To see pictures from the unit, click on the globe.

Back to Time 4 Teachers Main Page

Unit created by Irma Moses and Pat Smoyer and Brooks Widmaier